When MPS students demanded more black history, soul food
Since the mid-1960s, civil rights leaders in Milwaukee had been fighting for meaningful integration in the education of the city’s African-American students.
In early 1968, the students took up the fight themselves.
In 1967, amid concerns about the dearth of African-American history taught in Milwaukee Public Schools, MPS prepared a 92-page “supplement” outlining “the history of the Negro in America from his arrival on this continent to the present-day civil rights struggle,” the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Gerry Hinkley wrote in a Nov. 2, 1967, story.
For some students, it wasn’t enough.
On Jan. 29, 1968, about 100 students at Rufus King High School walked out of classes in protest, and about 30 of them met with MPS Superintendent Richard P. Gousha.
Gousha — the father of Mike Gousha, former Milwaukee TV news anchor and now a Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Marquette University Law School — promised the students that a pilot program for teaching “integrated American history” would be launched at Rufus King, The Milwaukee Journal reported Jan. 30.
A week later, on Feb. 5, about 800 students at North Division High School walked out of class, calling for more African-American history at their school.
The next day, during a second walkout, a group of about 40 North Division students met with Gousha. According to a story in the Feb. 7 Sentinel, the superintendent initially told them he couldn’t make a “definite commitment” until he had talked with school staff.
“They’re not going to do it!” a student shouted after leaving the meeting, according to a Feb. 7 Journal story.
That and other comments stoked the crowd, which had grown to about 1,000 students. File cabinets were overturned, about 20 windows were smashed and a police officer was injured when he was hit in the head by a rock.
On Feb. 8, the Sentinel reported that MPS would make the book “The American Negro” available to all American history students in five central city schools, including King and North Division.
The protests continued.
On Feb. 13, more than 200 students walked out of classes at Riverside High
School. On Feb. 23, 20 students were arrested in a protest at Wells Street Junior High School, where 200 had picketed demanding an integrated history course, the hiring of African-American cooks and the serving of “soul food” in the school cafeteria.
The Journal reported that students circled the junior high school, picketing and shouting: “We want black books. We want black food.”
The cafeteria protest wasn’t new in MPS; on Dec. 11, 1967, students at Fulton Junior High School began a monthlong boycott of that school’s cafeteria because none of its workers was African-American.
But the anger and energy was new. On Feb. 26, the school’s cafeteria was trashed in what the Sentinel called a “pupil melee,” with more than 20 tables overturned and dozens of plates of food thrown on the floor.
Fourteen students were arrested and 121 were suspended.
The protests for more AfricanAmerican representation in the curriculum and the cafeteria continued sporadically for the rest of the school year.